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U.S. carried out secret cyber strike on Iran after Saudi oil attack: officials

• techslam 7y ago
  Only in Dreams !
• seqastian 7y ago
  And it was kept secret until now? So I guess they haven't told trump about it?
  • TheCuckedKing 7y ago
    Good one man. Trump stinks. He's definitely going to get impeached. He's definitely not an unstoppable God at all. He definitely won't win in a landslide in 2020. He has a low IQ.
  • bugchasin 7y ago
    Good one squirt! Trump has low IQ. He won't win 2020 in landslide. He's def not going to make traps gay again. He's def not unstoppable God...
  • tupshin 7y ago
    Given their absurdly similar phrasings, I'm pretty certain both of the responses you got from this were bots. Or else two idiots with their own version of a copy pasta.
• ape4 7y ago
  Used to be that "secret" things stayed secret for 30 years or so.
  • hos234 7y ago
    Probably want Iran to not assume it's coming from Israel/Saudi etc...but then again these days people are crazy addicted to getting those like/click/view counts and I wouldn't be the least surprised if the Intel/Military community isn't immune. Can see two Generals competing for Likes somewhere.
  • archgoon 7y ago
    "Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?"
• HenryKissinger 7y ago
  There's not much anyone not in the know can say. We know Cyber Command and the NSA work together to penetrate adversarial networks. They are also very reluctant to share anything about their activities. They apparently wiped out the Iranian computers that were used to target the drone they shot down in the summer. We don't know how deep Cyber Command has embedded itself in the Iranian government's digital infrastructure. They have probably gone very, very far.
  • igivanov 7y ago
    Not likely at all. The Iranian defence structure is highly decentralized.
    • HenryKissinger 7y ago
      Doesn't matter. Cyber Command has a contingency plan, called Nitro Zeus, using cyber and other methods, to shut down the entire country of Iran. It's a full-scale attack in waiting. When Nakasone and Cyber Command looked at what their digital weapons could contribute to the battle plan, they focused on the Iranian targets that they could reach by boring into the country's networks: Iran's air defense, its communications systems, and its power grid. Nitro Zeus would be the opening act of the war plan: turning off an entire country so fast that retaliation would have been extremely difficult. It was also, in the minds of some of its creators, a glimpse of the future. The idea was to plunge the target country into blackness and confusion from the very beginning of a conflict. That would give Israel and the United States time to bomb the many suspected nuclear sites, take pictures of how much damage was done, and if necessary bomb them again. But the hope was that Nitro Zeus would avert an all-out war, because the Iranians would, in theory, not be able to strike back. As part of the plan, Iran's missile capability would also have been targeted. So, even as President Obama was worried about the vulnerability of America's electric grid, the United States was tunneling inside Iran's grid - along with its cell-phone network and even the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' command-and-control systems. "This was pretty mind blowing to me," one former official said. "Here we were, going to work every day behind sealed doors, essentially trying to figure out if it was possible to cripple an entire nation's infrastructure without ever firing a shot or dropping a bomb. So we littered Iran's networks with malware," he said, a reference to the process of placing implants in key strategic systems that could, later on, be used to inject destructive code or simply turn the networks off. "The hard part was keeping track of all of it," he said. Keeping track was tricky business because networks always change - and because there was no way to test Iran's vulnerabilities in field conditions. So Nakasone and the thousands of people at work on Nitro Zeus resorted to tabletop exercises, simulations of an attack. They tested and retested on a virtual model of Iran's networks to make sure that the implants were not visible to the Iranians and that collateral damage was limited. And they created answers from scratch to a series of questions: How do you take down the grid and keep it down? How about the air defenses? If the Iranians try to retaliate, how do you make sure they never get off the ground? "This was an enormous, and enormously complex, program," the former official said. "Before it was developed, the US had never assembled a combined cyber and kinetic attack plan on this scale." Source: David E. Sanger, "The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age", Crown, NY, 2018, pp.39-44
• thrower123 7y ago
  Much better than the ill-advised military strike that so many foreign policy demons were lusting for. It bothers me a lot that so many foreign policy experts can look at the unrelieved mess of things that they have made over the past generation, and think that this time, doing what has failed spectacularly so many times before is going to work out. Time to invent some new wheels.
  • monocasa 7y ago
    Micheal Hayden said during his Blackhat keynote that the US considers offensive cyber attacks from nation states to be acts of war, so probably not that much better.
    • freehunter 7y ago
      They say that, but the if the reports of state-sponsored cyber attacks on the US or US companies over the past 10+ years is any indication, the "war" that's mentioned in the "acts of war" statement isn't tanks rolling through Beijing, Tehran, or Moscow. If a cyber attack leads to war, it seems to lead to cyber war like this article. Not physical war.
      • monocasa 7y ago
        He made it pretty clear that it was a real, dropping bombs, boots on the ground, cause for war. I think it's more that the US applies these rules unequally. You execute a cyber attack on us, we'll overthrow your government and laugh as the rabble beheads you in the streets. If we execute a cyber attack on you, what are you going to do? We have nukes. The framework he laid out is actually pretty interesting because it made it very clear that espionage is totally on the table, which is as far as the countries that do have nukes are willing to go here.
        • freehunter 7y ago
          Again, that may be what they said but it doesn't match reality. We've been attacked, the DNI named names, and there are no tanks rolling through Moscow, Tehran, or Beijing. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/29/china-russia-could-disrupt-us-infrastructure-with-cyber-attacks-odni.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/29/china-russia-could-disrupt-u...
• parasanti 7y ago
  This "anonymous source" who is disclosing classified information should be punished. This is not good for anyone.
  • wpdev_63 7y ago
    Well they did the same thing with venezuela if you weren't paying attention. They were taking out whole electric power grids. So it's not exactly a secret.
    • whb07 7y ago
      Why oh why would they care about a powerless, broke, and decaying country like Venezuela? Got any deep throat sources for this besides some out-of-options “president”?
      • wpdev_63 7y ago
        srsly?? oil...
        • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
          whb07 asked for sources. Your reply is rather lacking. Mockingly declaring that you don't actually need sources, because oil, is not the same as actually supplying a source...
      • AtlasLion 7y ago
        Murica must control how the oil flows.
      • monocasa 7y ago
        Removing left wing governments in South and Central America by any means necessary has been US policy for almost a century now. A cyber attack on infrastructure is very much on brand.
      • blueline 7y ago
        compared to the coups/assassinations in south/central america over the last few decades a cyber attack is pretty mild...
• wil421 7y ago
  For the people commenting about leakers and things being secret in the past, I’ll bet money the government leaked this themselves.
  • jsight 7y ago
    Yeah, that definitely happens from time to time. Here is a pretty famous case from recent history: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-24/trump-assails-fake-news-blasts-media-use-of-anonymous-sources https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-24/trump-ass...
  • Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Don’t forget that “the government “ consists of many departments full of people with conflicting interests. What one part may view as useful could be viewed by another part as treason.
  • mtgx 7y ago
    One surefire ways to know if this is true or not is to see if the government makes a big deal out of "going after the leakers" and putting them in prison for 10+ years, while telling us how the leak hurt national security and undercover operatives.
  • notlukesky 7y ago
    The more important problem is that we don’t even know if this attack: 1) ever occurred 2) if it did occur, was it even the US 3) if it was even an attack, was it in fact a cyberattack at all (you would want to protect actual human assets who do physical damage in say industrial control systems as an insider job by saying it was a remote attack using some sort of zero day attack) Anonymous government sources, especially in cyber security, have a track record of persistent lying Remember the China chip hacking story by Bloomberg built on anonymous government sources. The alleged fake news was never retracted - even though it was technically not a possible attack if you know how chips are made. (There are chips that had arguably deliberately installed flaws - the Intel chip with the OTP generator that was trivially crackable and the RSA keyfob with the default NSA backdoor). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h... https://siliconangle.com/2018/10/22/apple-amazon-super-micro-call-bloomberg-retract-china-spy-chip-story/ https://siliconangle.com/2018/10/22/apple-amazon-super-micro... https://www.wired.com/2013/09/rsa-advisory-nsa-algorithm/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/rsa-advisory-nsa-algorithm/
• resters 7y ago
  To zoom out slightly, consider the famous phrase war is politics with guns. Would it ever be the case that war is politics with cyber strikes? As the article points out, the strikes were politically motivated (against Iran's regime), but were they an act of war? Under what circumstances should the American people tolerate an act of war being carried out on their "behalf"? In my view, the democratic process should be used to prevent the US from doing "warmaking" that is not broadly supported by the public. In fact, as it is well known, the framers required congress to declare war. So what is the purpose of the US conducting such a strike done without democratic consent? My guess is that it was conducted to help nudge the American people into accepting acts of war by executive fiat against Iran, when the legal justification for them is at risk of being removed via the democratic process (1). The house passed a bill requiring congressional authorization, but the senate did not. So we can view the cyber strike as the executive branch asserting its power to make war against Iran without the sort of missiles and bombs that make Americans easily think of it as war. 1. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/19/18691936/house-democrats-vote-repeal-9-11-aumf-war-iran https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/19/18691936/h...
  • daveslash 7y ago
    >> In my view, the democratic process should be used to prevent the US from doing "warmaking" that is not broadly supported by the public. I would agree with you on principle. In practice, I'm not sure that the general public is capable of really understanding or digesting the concepts of cyber-warfare. At least, not in a way that would lend itself well to the democratic process. Unfortunately.
    • rubidium 7y ago
      We don't take away from the democratic process that which is hard to understand. Your concern has been raised by politicians for hundreds of years. All it would take (in the US) for the the representative congress to pass a new law which makes foreign cyber interference only permissible when passed by the the house and senate, similar to declarations of war.
  • randomsearch 7y ago
• everdrive 7y ago
  Was there any measurable effect? I'm not convinced anything was accomplished here.
• Aperocky 7y ago
  Is it me or does it feel hypocritical of the US government when it constantly cry about cyber operation from China and Russia while conducting (probably a lot more than this certain case) and leaking cyber operation of US? Like, if everyone including yourself is knee deep and slinging mud, don't accuse other people for being dirty.
  • mc32 7y ago
    Depends on if it’s reactionary or provocative.
  • gherkinnn 7y ago
    Of course governments seem hypocritical. Until you realise that every large entity, be it governmental or private, practices realpolitik quite consistently.
  • hannasanarion 7y ago
    Responding to a missile attack by screwing with the attacker's missile targeting systems is not really comparable to attacking an election to put one of your cronies at the top of another country's government.
    • gherkinnn 7y ago
      “Put one of your cronies at the top of another country’s government” Do you mean US meddling in Iran in 1953 or the other way around today?
      • hannasanarion 7y ago
        Why do you think the CIA kept Operation Ajax a secret from the American public until 1992?
        • gherkinnn 7y ago
          ;) It wasn’t until 2017 that Britain released documents on their part in Operation Boot.
• rebuilder 7y ago
  I could swear there was speculation about precisely this just after the strikes. Anyone remember it?
• davidwitt415 7y ago
  Apropos to the Noam Chomsky 'Manufacturing Consent' thread, the USG and Corporate Media have enshrined the false narrative that this was an Iranian attack. While Iran is supporting the Yemenis, independent military analysts agree that Yemen had the capabilities to carry out the attack, and it came from Yemen. Furthermore, no real evidence has been provided to tie Iran to the attack. Also carefully glossed over is that the Saudis started a war of aggression against Yemen, one of the poorest countries on earth, fully supported by US arms and military. The claims of Iranian support for Yemen are dwarfed by the overt support of Saudi Arabia by the USG.
  • akvadrako 7y ago
    What's the evidence it came from Yemen? Are they claiming the images released by SA are faked? What about the claim the attacks came from the North? So far I haven't seen any evidence from either side.
    • davidwitt415 7y ago
      The Houthi claimed responsibility, for starters. Also, as noted by Scott Ritter, 'there is the largest concentration of modern air defense radars in the Persian Gulf oriented toward Iran, and not one detected and tracked these launches?' The Iran connection was immediately seized by both the USG and SA for their own purposes before the incident was even investigated. Both sides have motives that encourage fingering Iran. They promised to reveal the findings, but as of today, nothing further has been made public. This, despite the fact that the USG should have readily available sensor data that would show if the attack were to have originated in Iran, and if it were so, then that would be a causus belli for direct war on Iran, yet that dog never barked.
• tracker1 7y ago
  The fact is, it's all complicated... Since (and before) stuxnet, cyber warfare has escalated and the number of (presumed) state actors is present pretty much everywhere. The attacks are constant and don't stop. Anyone doing cyber security in an international or government system experiences this daily.